At age of empires II I was once highly competitive... Got 2nd in a few (non-money) tournaments. All the exceptional players played wiht the expansion however, and I was mediocre at best with the expansion because I was not very good at micro-managing horses (HUGE emphasis on this in the expansion, if you can't do it then you basically can't be good unless you play loser maps). In the non-expansion though, I was probably top twenty among hte "known to be good" community at one point.
It wasn't worth the time it took though.